Published: 17 April 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
On the centenary of his death near the? Somme aged just 27, a new memoir of Rosenberg, Whitechapel Boy, has been published. Reading his work for the first time in the 1960s, author Chris Searle says he felt "almost as if I knew [Rosenberg]”: "His humanity, his ability to express what ordinary people were going through" meant that Rosenberg "felt like a brother".
Unlike many other so-called war poets, the working-class Rosenberg never rose above the rank of Private. There were no officer dug-outs to catch a few minutes' respite from the horror of the trenches. Rosenberg would jot down a verse or two on YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) notepaper, whenever he could find a bit of candle or campfire for light.
As Jean Liddiard writes in Isaac Rosenberg, Selected Poems and Letters (2003), "It was astonishing that as a private soldier in the trenches he managed to write anything at all".
The result is poetry which brims with compassion for his fellow man. Rosenberg expresses solidarity with "his brothers dear", comrades on the frontlines. In Dead Man's Dump (1917), considered by many to be his masterpiece, "[dead bodies] lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman; the trenches are shown to make equals of us all.”
"As soon as he went to the trenches, I believe his humanity just overran everything else", reflects Searle. In the same poem, the reader looks through the eyes of a stretcher-bearer down at a wounded charge, whose "drowning soul was sunk too deep for human tenderness". The reader is made a literary witness to the unimaginable.
Yet his poetry can also evoke grotesque beauty and humour. In Louse Hunting (1917), the poet sets the stage for "A demons' pantomime" of soldiers pouncing upon lice: "See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling/Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this revel."
Among the general public, Rosenberg is less well known than other Great War poets. Searle blames this on Rosenberg's working-class Jewish background.
Following his death, Rosenberg's work was championed by leading literary figures including D.W. Harding and F.R. Leavis. Keith Douglas, the World War II poet, acknowledges his debt of gratitude to the East Londoner, writing in Desert Flowers (1943), "Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying".
Like many other Jews in his social circle, Rosenberg was ideologically opposed to conflict: "My people are all Tolstoylians [sic] and object to my being in khaki", he wrote to fellow poet RC Trevelyan in May 1916.
Those “people”, like painters David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, and poets John Rodker and Stephen Winsten, were known as The Whitechapel Boys, a kind of East End Jewish equivalent to the Bloomsbury Group. Rosenberg had only enlisted in the war in order to help his impoverished parents financially, and was critical of those, like poet Robert Brooke, whose sonnets glorified sacrifice in war.
Many Jewish immigrants were also reluctant to fight on the same side as a despotic Tsarist regime they had only recently fled, as Britain and Russia were allies. Ironically, many of them had left Eastern Europe in order to avoid the notorious 25-year forced conscription of Jewish males into the Russian army.
In June 1916 the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, himself Jewish, presented the immigrants with an ultimatum: Russians of military age in Britain must either enlist in the British army or return to Russia to serve there. The immigrant Jewish community was outraged, with The Committee of Delegates of Russian Socialist Groups in London, responding, "We came here counting upon safety - and now it is proposed to carry us forcibly back to Russian?? from which we escaped, unless we submit to the act of brutality demanding from us that we should enter the British army".
However, British Jews did fight in great numbers. Out of a total Jewish population of 280,000, 41,000 British Jews fought in the World War I, and 50,000 from across the Empire (2000 Jews from Australia alone). In 1915, the Zion Mule Corps, a battalion of Jews from Palestine and Egypt, was formed and fought in the Gallipoli campaign.
Two years later three entirely Jewish battalions, the 38th, 39th and 40th Royal Fusiliers, some , 6000 men, were pitted against the Ottomans. One famous alumnus was David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. Rosenberg applied for a transfer here but was killed before his request could be granted.
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Among the general public, Rosenberg is less well known than other Great War poets, notably Wilfred Owen, a name as familiar to English schoolchildren as Dickens or Hardy. Searle, who is not Jewish, blames this on Rosenberg's working-class Jewish background: "Even his name is enough for many English readers to doubt his Englishness, in today’s cosmopolitan England too".
Whatever the reason for a posthumous shortfall in recognition - after all, Siegfried Sassoon was also Jewish - Rosenberg's origins certainly didn't make things easier for him when he was alive. Thus in The Jew (1916), the poet asks, "The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, /with the same heaving blood, /Keep tide to the moon of Moses. / Then why do they sneer at me?”
In the foreword to Rosenberg's posthumous Collected Works (1937), Sassoon wrote that Rosenberg's work was "a fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture". However, Rosenberg identified only as an English poet, and in particular felt a close affinity with William Blake, whose work also expressed deep empathy with the working man.
His verse contains images from the Bible, both Old and New Testament, as well as from Greek mythology, and European history, ancient and modern. Similarly, his repertoire extends beyond mere war poetry. In the last few weeks of his life, he imagined life far removed from his reality: his unfinished verse play, The Unicorn, is about, of all things, the struggle for racial equality in Africa.
In the last poem he wrote, Through These Pale Cold Days (1917), Rosenberg returns to the Bible of his roots, speaking of how "dark faces burn out of three thousand years", whose "wild eyes yearn for the pools of Hebron again - for Lebanon's summer slope".
By the time the poem arrived to his friend and patron, Edward Marsh in London, in a letter where the poet apologised for a vocabulary, "impoverished and bare", Rosenberg was already dead.
Photo: Detail from portrait of Isaac Rosenberg (Poetry Foundation)
